I can’t believe it’s been almost 2 years since Amy and I moved from Atlanta back to our home state of Florida. We rented a place in Winter Park for our first 6 months and then in early 2017 (actually between Christmas and New Year’s) we moved into our cozy, mid-century ranch home in Orlando’s historic Audubon Park neighborhood. Unlike our epic “Pulley House” project in Decatur or our 1970s cabin house in Columbia, we haven’t really done much renovating.

I should preface this post by admitting that I felt a little uneasy about sharing the listing for our house yesterday because a.) I never thought I’d own a home worth over a half million dollars and b.) anyone with the wherewithal to click price/tax history in Zillow will see that we only paid $145k for it. When Amy and I moved in 5 years ago, our house was filthy and neglected with an awkward galley kitchen, no working shower, a dying HVAC unit, an old roof and several broken windows. We dubbed it “The Pulley House” because there were climbing ropes hanging from pulleys mounted around a skylight that dangled from the 3rd floor loft all the way down to the 1st floor living room. Supposedly, they were for hanging plants. Supposedly.

When Amy and I were planning our move from Florida to South Carolina in 2005, we knew that we wanted to buy. Having lived in 3 different tiny apartments during our last 2 years in Gainesville, we were fed up with renting and desperate for a place of our own. Knowing that the PhD program at USC was going to be a 5 year commitment, we forked over every penny we had toward a down payment and dove head first into home ownership.

Given our still-fresh-out-of-college budget, most of the properties we found needed work – a lot of work. I don’t think a single house we looked at was staged to sell and many of them were, well, pretty boring…

When Amy and I bought our first place back in 2005, we knew it had awesome potential, but that it was majorly outdated. The picture on the right shows what it looked like sometime in 2007. Over the years, we’ve replaced all the builder-grade 70s fixtures, removed wallpaper, scraped popcorn,…

Update: We ended up going with a slight variation of scheme #4 below. You can see the finished color along with all the before & after pictures of our first home in my 2011 post, Here We Go Again. Ames and I have been talking about painting our house for…